Vulnerability and Closeness: New Methods

Vulnerability and Closeness: New Methods
Maya Livio and JP Merz in residence August 16-31, 2016.
Welcome to my Guest Room Digital Artist Residency Program
welcometomyhomepage.net/guestroom

In an exquisitely conceptual online experiment, Maya Livio and JP Merz are opening up about themselves and their relationship in an attempt to suss out the effects that vulnerable actions have on interpersonal closeness and public power. The pair, recently distanced by a move, are using the Guest Room as a way station to collect digital care packages, meet up for video calls, and share text messages - all of which are live-streamed or meticulously archived for you to discover.

Whether you find yourself driven to visit each posted weblink, obsessively refreshing the page in hopes of catching a live-stream on the “couch”, or contemplating your own experiences of closeness and vulnerability in digital space - we’re all implicated in the experiment. Once you first stumble into the middle of a video hangout, right after pilfering through a days worth of Maya and JP’s archived texts, you’ll know exactly what I mean.


Maya Livio’s research centers on the unresolved points of failure between on and offline systems. She is particularly interested in data and platform politics, networked intimacy, mediated vulnerability, and feminist critiques of technology. Her modes of inquiry into these subjects include both digital methods as well as practice-based research approaches.
Livio is a research affiliate at the Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam, a Curator of MediaLive, an annual media arts festival hosted by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and a Curator of the Media Archaeology Lab. She holds a master’s degree in New Media & Digital Culture from the University of Amsterdam and a bachelor’s degree in Art from the University of Maryland.

JP Merz is a composer and sound artist who works with classical, jazz, and rock musicians, as well as improvisers, dancers, electrical engineers, programming languages, and robots. His recent work explores intimate, emotion-driven, and kinesthetic experiences of sound. JP’s music has been performed by members of the JACK Quartet, Altius Quartet, Playground Ensemble, Iowa Center for New Music, and Colorado New Music Ensemble at places like New Music on the Point (NMOP), the Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE), San Francisco Fringe Festival, Electronic Music Midwest, basements, coffee shops and laptop speakers.
In addition to composing, JP performs on guitar, electric viola, and electronics with an eclectic variety of groups ranging from new music/improv ensembles to folk-rock bands. He just moved from Boulder, CO to Minneapolis, MN.


The Welcome to my Guest Room Digital Residency Program is operated by and located in the attic space of welcometomyhomepage.net, a net.art project initiated in 2014. The Guest Room is open to artists of all sorts. Residencies last two to four weeks and are completely open to guest interpretation.